The Gods at Play: Polytheism Rehabilitated

(August, 2002)
A man’s religion is the audacious bid he makes to bind himself to
creation and to the Creator. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge
and to complete his own personality by finding the supreme
context in which he rightly belongs.
Gordon Allport, The Individual and His Religion
Religion is taken much too seriously these days by almost everyone who
takes it seriously at all. Between the forces of sacred and secular society, the
wars of the Enlightenment seem to be flaring up again. Some demand a
theocratic polity in which legitimate law and power flow downwards from
an almighty God. Others prefer to live in a secular polity where power is
delegated upwards from a sovereign People, whose liberty of religious
belief must be protected by a separation of church and state. Most of the
latter, though, seem to have little use for religion, professing a lukewarm
theism (if that) that requires nothing from them in the way of lifestyle or
practice. Scarcely anyone seems able to take religion as I believe it is best
taken: both seriously and playfully at the same time, as an aspect of life that
individuals and communities are vitally engaged with, but one that’s finally
a matter of intellectual judgment, aesthetic discernment and self-expression.
Part of the problem seems to stem from our traditions of philosophic
monism and religious monotheism which, from certain perspectives,
amount almost to the same thing. Both deal in absolutes of Truth and
Morals. Both, therefore, reflect and encourage a certain rigidity of outlook,
thinking in terms of universal norms and more or less “normal” or “deviant”
individuals. Both are uncomfortable with the pluralism of post-modern
society which offers the individual a wide choice of sub-cultures and norms
– each with an integrity of its own.
As against these staunch monists and monotheists, my own commitment
is to pluralism – but to some form of pluralism that is epistemologically,
morally and politically serious. If there is no such form, I may have to slit
my wrists before fanatics, of whichever imperialising persuasion, come to
burn me, or send me away for re-education. For reasons that are fairly
obvious and as a matter of historical experience, I think some form of
polytheism may be friendlier to a diversity of values, beliefs and lifestyles
than monotheism has ever been, or can be. Accordingly, my purpose here is
to promote one version of polytheism and, more generally, a renewed
interest in that whole approach to religion. I must begin by explaining my
interest in religion to readers who do not share it, or whose religious
feelings preclude the approach I will be describing.
Accepting Allport’s challenge to reflect on the “supreme context in
which I rightly belong” I find, to begin with, the physical, biological and
socio-cultural/historical realities that I have had to live with, of which I
have acquired a certain experience and knowledge. For example, I know
myself to be a physical body of a certain weight that I can feel in my aging
knee joints and fallen arches. I know my body can be injured or killed, and
that it will wear out soon enough in any case. I know it to be the body of a
male primate, with the anatomy, drives and instincts that this genetic legacy
implies. I have also gained some awareness of the world’s history, with its
bloody, mostly stupid conflicts, its great works of art and intellect, and its
varied religious traditions – especially as these have helped to shape me.
I was the child of Jewish parents, born in New York City in 1942 during
the Second World War, and raised and educated there until I left the United
States to stay out of the Viet Nam war at the age of 23. For 30 years now, I
have been a citizen of Canada, residing for most of that time in Ottawa, its
capital. I had a daughter by my first wife, and played some part in the
raising of several step-children. I made a living writing reports on contract,
mostly for various departments of the Canadian federal government. Today,
I own and run a small used book store that leaves me ample leisure for
writing pieces like this one. I still teach aikido, a Japanese martial art, and I
pursue an interest in philosophy, especially cognitive and political
philosophy, as my energies and capabilities permit. Autobiography along
these lines would be a second level of context.
There is a third level as well: Like other people, I did not altogether take
the world as I found it, but bumped against it, got beyond (or above, or
behind) it to some extent, and was able to change it in small ways because
something of me transcended the merely given. The real significance of this
is difficult to assess. In objective terms, the difference I made has certainly
been small – not just because “I am only a little man,” but because on a
cosmic scale the same is true even of world-historical figures. Yet this
capacity for transcendence (such as it is) seems very important to me, as it
has to almost everyone who reflects on these matters. It seems to be the
most important and characteristically human thing about me, the thing that
makes religious questions arise at all. Even knowing that this body is
mortal, and that when it goes, the person I had been will vanish with it, it
seems wrong somehow to identify my self (whatever that is) just with the
body and the social person. This perception is not evidence of an after-life,
but it is something more than mere inability to imagine my own death.
Rather, it’s an awareness that my body, my personal history and my social
identity do not exhaust my sense of self.
I don’t believe that immortality of the soul can be deduced from this
transcendental sense of self, but am aware that many do believe this. What
seems more plausible to me is that the sense of self includes much more
than the dying animal with its thoughts and memories. It includes too all the
things and people I have genuinely loved – a whole world and universe,
potentially.
It’s not easy to explain what else I understand about my life’s context. I
know I don’t believe in the literal existence of any God or Gods, as most
religious people say they do; yet, in an odd way, I find myself more
concerned with religion than most explicit believers.
As will be obvious from this essay’s title, my leanings are toward a
certain kind of polytheism, so will henceforth speak of Gods in the plural,
unless I specifically mean the single God of monotheists – “the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
I think it’s more important to love the Gods than to believe in them. I try
to love life and this world, and thence whatever Gods or laws of physics
made it. I don’t always succeed, because in many ways the world I live in is
not a very nice place. I find no plausibility at all in the idea of an all-
powerful deity who is, at the same time, benevolent. For me, it is easier to
see love in a Darwinian world painfully groping for survival and order, than
in a Judaeo-Christian or Muslim world working by, or toward, some
“divine” plan that seems to make no human sense at all.
I had no religious upbringing to speak of, and have never been a church-
goer. My parents – my father especially – were complete secularists, and
fairly hostile to the whole idea of religion. I remember that my father was
puzzled, and even angered by the interest in Taoist and Buddhist thought
that I shared with much of my generation in my late teens, and by the more
serious interest in comparative theology and religious history that I
developed in my late twenties.
By now, in an eclectic sort of way, I might describe myself as a casual
worshiper in several religious traditions: I become Taoist, Zen Buddhist and
thoroughly Animist when I practice or teach aikido. As a communicant of
Western civilization I have been heavily influenced by Christian culture and
outlook. In my sexuality, I would have to describe myself as a Pagan,
offering submissive devotion to the Goddess.
 I can follow Catholic theologians in dividing the cosmic order into three
parts: There is The Father (a physical and metaphysical order pre-existing
humanity and life); there is The Son (the human self1 in an order of right
relationship). As well, pervading all sentient minds, there seems to be a kind
of psychic order (The Holy Spirit) that reflects and seeks a harmony with
the external world. As a good Catholic then, I can recognize some such
trinity as logically distinguishable, and yet inseparable aspects of a single
cosmic order. Until recently, I remain very much a Jew in my conviction
that this order is single, whole, indivisible, beyond graphic or verbal
representation, to be questioned, and wrestled or negotiated with, not just
accepted on authority.
However, some years ago, my Jewish skepticism began to wrestle with
my Jewish monotheism. The former has been winning; and, for the reasons
to be discussed here, I am now inclined to reject monotheism as a
discredited conjecture. Why should we assume that the divinity behind the
world is single, except in the dialectical, Hegelian sense that every conflict
can be considered as a single system divided against itself? Today I think
the Greeks were more nearly right the first time, in their pre-philosophic
idea that what we confront is a cosmic game or struggle amongst a number
of sovereign principles that sometimes cooperate, but also contend for
influence – disputing, forming alliances, doing battle and negotiating
settlements, much like their human subjects.

1 The Need for Religion

Following Allport’s suggestion with honesty and seriousness, almost the
first thing we notice about “the supreme context” of our lives is that the
world we live in is not of our own making. Science explains the workings
of that world in marvelous detail, but tells almost nothing about our proper
relationship to it or to each other. We learn how its systems work, and how
these can be manipulated for human purposes, but find little guidance for
shaping our lives and reconciling our disparate purposes. To this great
political problem, value-free science does not speak at all – nor should it;
that is not its job. But then a void is left; and some other field or discipline –
some other aspect of culture – must try to do so.
Scientific knowledge takes us only so far. Science can teach us about the
needs and workings of a human body, and how coordinated human activity

1 But see the next essay in this collection, The Idea of the Self.
leads to desired and undesired consequences. From an ethical and political
perspective, this will be valuable as a constraint on morally acceptable
political doctrine; but to ground a scheme of values something more is
needed – a sense of identity in this world, an idea of what we are doing
here, of what we are supposed to be doing. We need a meaningful place in
the grand scheme of things that science cannot provide. Indeed, science has
mostly stripped us of any sense of cosmic meaning by showing how tiny we
are in the grand scheme, and how indifferent is that scheme to human hope
and suffering.
We can – at least, many of us can – dispense with the reassurance that
our strivings and sorrows have cosmic significance. But no one, not even
the most hard headed atheist, can function without some orientation for
their own values: a general sense of which way is up. And it is plain
historical fact that neither the body’s needs and appetites nor the status
games of society have ever quite sufficed as the basis for such orientation,
or for a satisfying life. We need, it seems, to be able to imagine the world as
an entity (or entities) with which one can have some sort of relationship. Yet
the more we study it with the mind and instruments of science, the less it
appears to be anything of the sort.
We can use imagination – fantasy to find an intelligibly human order
behind the cosmos; and there is nothing foolish or superstitious in doing so,
so long as we remember that this is what we are doing. What is
superstitious, dangerously so, is to confuse symbols and ideas with material
actualities – the map with the territory, as Korzybski said. And this,
unfortunately, we are only too apt to do. We fail to draw the necessary
distinction between questions of fact and questions of interpretation to
which the concept of factual truth does not apply. Religion now – all
religion – belongs in the latter category. It is our ultimate interpretation of
Life and of the World we live in. As such, it is a category error either to
believe in or to question the existence of any God. A God is an idea of the
world, or some aspect thereof, as agent and interlocutor. Ideas do not have
or lack existence in the same sense as coffee mugs and winning lottery
tickets. It is just philosophical confusion to ask whether an interpretation
exists, or whether it is factually true. What we should ask is whether they
assist or hinder understanding.
Because we understand ourselves and each other as conscious agents,
and scarcely know how to have relationships except with other agents of
this kind, it is natural to imagine human-like “Gods” and “Goddesses”
behind the fabric of the universe, and all but impossible to do otherwise. We
can scarcely avoid personifying the world and society to some extent. When
we think about “the supreme context” of our lives, there is scarcely
anything else we can do. We should remember though that these Gods and
spirits, like ordinary human minds, are not entities in the same sense as
animals and trees and coffee mugs. We can avoid superstition in a spiritual
life if we bear in mind that our Gods and Goddesses are just ideas to which
sentiments of awe and divinity are attached.
A sentiment is an attitude toward something – an emotion or posture
with which that thing is approached and thought about and dealt with.
Religious awe, the sense of divinity, is one very powerful and important
sentiment of which human beings are capable. It may be attached without
superstition to the physical world, to living nature, to the global system of
social inter-relationships, to the energies that drive these systems, and to the
principles that govern them. It may even be attached without superstition to
living persons and creatures and to inanimate things – so long as it is
remembered that these attachments are symbolic in nature.
In conclusion then: It’s a legitimate act of imagination to personify the
world as a whole, or some principle, aspect or feature thereof, as a Being
with whom one can have relationship. It is natural to think of such
personifications as Gods or Goddesses, because we only know how to have
relationships with other persons, and because all persons in our experience
present themselves with some kind of gender. We really should learn to stop
fighting over what we like to do with our imaginations. The mischief occurs
when we forget that we are imagining – when we insist that our fantasies
are “real,” and that other people should imagine and relate as we do.

2 The Religious Imagination

With the foregoing understood, it will be clear that asking whether there
really exists a single God, or a plurality of Gods, or no Gods at all, is just
the wrong question. The sentiment of divinity. if one feels it, may be
directed toward the whole material world, or toward the biosphere of living
creatures, toward some imagined Creator and/or Sustainer of the world,
toward various principles that seem to underlie and drive the world as a
whole, or toward the spirits that seem to animate its individual beings. It
may be directed toward all of the above or none. The being(s) toward whom
a man directs his sense of the divine (if he has such a sense) are as personal
as those toward whom he directs his sexual desire, or any other of his
emotions. That said, like other paradigms or schema of interpretation,
different religious conceptions seem natural and appropriate to different
lifestyles, and even to different specific purposes.
One purpose of this essay is to say a good word for “polytheistic”
religion, in hopes of restoring its place in theological discourse. Unfairly
denigrated for many centuries by a vast monotheist literature, it has more
going for it than we’ve been willing to recognize; and in this pluralistic age,
it seems important to restore a balance2. But this is not to argue for its
“truth.” To repeat and insist on this point: Religious systems are
interpretations of human experience. As such they are not true or false, but
interesting, serious, consoling, edifying, fruitful – or their opposites: dull,
frivolous, frightening alienating, or whatever. “By their fruits ye shall know
3
them,” as Jesus rightly said. Prophets and their teachings can be known by
nothing else.

Animism
Rather than debate the existence of God or Gods, a better question would be
about the presence of “spirit” in the world we inhabit. This concept derives
from a very ancient paradigm called animism, that sees each living thing as
4
endowed and moved by a substance – its ghost or spirit that makes the
difference between a living creature and a dead one. When your spirit
departs, the material body left behind is dead, and can no longer function
nor even hold itself together. In dealing with any creature or thing that has,
or seems to have, intentions of its own, we must deal somehow with its
spirit – overcome or seduce or bribe it, or even trick it if we can – so that it
yields to our purposes or, at least, does not oppose them. Now, for gatherers,
hunters and warriors – especially for those who lack sophisticated weapons
and have to meet their prey or foe at close quarters, on more or less equal
terms – this idea has much to recommend it. In suggesting that your

2 Please note that pluralism should not be confused either with relativism or with
materialism. It is entirely possible to recognize validity in many religious
schemes without considering that one is good as another, still less that they are
equally worthless; and that is the stance I am taking here.
3 Matthew 7:20
4 Called prana in yoga, and chi or ki in the Chinese or Japanese martial arts. The
Latin word is anima, whence our word “animal.” In all these languages as in
English, the word binds ideas of “mind,” “soul,” “breath,” “volition,”
“intention,” and “energy” into a single concept.
intended victim has as much right to live as you do yourself, it encourages
life-preserving attitudes of humility, respect and prudence. It suggests too
the possibility of co-opting and/or leading an adversary’s spirit instead of
squandering your own power by trying to overcome your opponent’s
physical strength. For this last reason, the animist paradigm is still deployed
in several martial arts – notably in aikido, whose name can be translated,
“the way of harmonized spirit.” Above all, it carves vast, terrifying Nature
into more intelligible chunks, each with a spirit of its own that can be dealt
with or propitiated on its own terms.
The strength and drawback of animism is that each such chunk of the
world (having its own proper spirit) must be perceived as unique; and this
strong emphasis on the particularity of things, though a help for some
purposes, will be a hindrance for others. Especially, it will hinder the
powerful cognitive technique of classifying things so that they may be
planned for, dealt with, and controlled in the aggregate, instead of one by
one. Even farming is awkward, if we are worried that every chicken has a
spirit of its own.

Monotheism
Monotheism is completely at the other extreme. As Man learned to
domesticate, and then to urbanize and bureaucratize his environment, the
world came to seem more contrived and mechanical than alive.
Autonomous spirit then withdrew from the myriad creatures to whom it had
primordially been attributed, to become concentrated in a single Supreme
Being. Fragments of spirit were then gifted, as it were, by this transcendent
deity to certain privileged creatures (ourselves) who, in this sense, were
made in His own image. What emerged was the monotheist vision common
to the three religions of The Book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In
place of a multitude of individual spirits, there is now a single God outside
of and behind His creation. Our world and we ourselves were called into
being and set in motion through His law. But that world is not intrinsically
divine, and its creatures not even animate, in the strict sense. Human beings
have our “sparks” of divine spirit that we can save or lose. Other creatures –
like the farmer’s chickens – are just soulless automata to be used at our
good pleasure and convenience. They exist for God and for us, but not for
themselves. Indeed they have no selves at all.
Today, in a pluralistic world, facing various ecological catastrophes, this
tradition violates many people’s sensibilities and conscience. Certainly, it
lacks the authority it once enjoyed. Nor is this simply an unfortunate
symptom of moral decay, as many conventionally devout persons would
argue. On the contrary, for some of the major issues that confront us, I think
it can be shown (though I will not attempt it here) that the monist or
monotheist vision has become an intellectual and spiritual liability.

Polytheism
The crucial feature of polytheist religion is not that the Gods are plural, but
that they contend and play. A multiplicity of deities would not matter if the
Gods always saw eye-to-eye, or could negotiate agreement on how the
universe should be run. In that case, for all practical purposes, what we’d
have would be a monotheism: However many “Gods” would be just so
many functionaries of an over-arching cosmic bureaucracy under a single
cosmic constitution. By contrast, the most significant things about the
Olympian Gods and Goddesses (though Plato stuffily disapproved) are their
individual fields of interest, their differing goals, and their constant
squabbling. For this reason, the Greek and other polytheistic religions
would be better understood as ludic or eristic systems: theologies of play
and strife5. Except as history and literature, they have received almost no
serious consideration for more than 1700 years, since Julian the Apostate
tried and failed to reverse Constantine’s decision to establish Christianity as
the official religion of the decaying Roman empire.
If we speak of ludic religion on one hand, we should probably contrast it
with authority-based religion on the other. For, what the choice between
mono- and poly- theism comes down to in the end is the preference between
top-down and bottom-up world views – between a world planned and
ordained by a sovereign will, and a world that puts itself together and runs
under the influence of various principles which may sometimes prompt in
different directions.
The monotheist idea amounts finally to the conjecture that a coherent set
of principles – the Mind of God, so to speak – pre-exists the phenomenal
world, whether human creatures can discern these principles or not. In
physics, the search for such fundamental principles has been extraordinarily
fruitful; indeed, a Theory of Everything may eventually be found. By
contrast, for the biosphere, and what has been called the noösphere – the
world of Mind – the quest for universal law has proved not only futile, but a
5 See Huizinga’s fine book, Homo Ludens–for a discussion of the concept of play,
and its role in human affairs.
distraction from what we can see to be going on. For the sciences of Life
and Mind – biology, psychology and all the social sciences – what I am
calling ludic theology now seems more appropriate than the authority-based
theology of Abraham, Moses and Plato, whatever its achievements in the
past.
Let me spell this out. Monism (or monotheism), the top-down viewpoint,
encouraged people to conceive of a universe governed by divine law that
was the same always and everywhere, and of an ecumenical polity governed
by an imperial code that was the same everywhere. The quest to write such
a code, to articulate such law in human terms turned up results of capital
importance, though its ultimate objective – the City of God on Earth – has
not been achieved, and never will be. Indeed, if we pursue that project, we
may end up destroying the Earth over the question of whose God is to
prevail in our global city.
Both in political theory and practical politics today, we get further by
imagining the world as a kind of self-organizing game that makes up its
own rules as it goes along. Even in physics, the fruitful hypothesis now
appears to be that fundamental law come into being at the same time as
mass-energy, and the space-time framework itself. So far as I can tell,
fundamental physics is done these days by considering what structures
might evolve when principles of symmetry are applied to quantum
mechanics. In biology, top-down thinking has been completely superseded
by a Darwinian (bottom-up) paradigm of gene pool evolution and the theory
of self-organizing systems. In psychology, it appears that infant brains
somehow configure themselves during the first year of life to cope with the
world that impinges on them. In the social sciences, we are now learning to
think of cultures and whole societies as “ecologies of mind” that configure
and construe themselves in the process of wresting a livelihood from their
environments. The notion that our norms and beliefs are God-given while
theirs (at best) are crude approximations is scarcely reputable. In general,
the claim that social institutions and leaders were given us by divine
dispensation has nothing going for it except the need by authorities to cover
their nakedness with a scrap of legitimacy, and the desperate need of the
rest of us to believe that someone up there is looking after our welfare.

3 Five Gods or Principles

With the above in mind, I ask you to lay monotheistic preconceptions aside,
and to consider on its merits the system I will now describe. I mean these
ideas quite seriously and reverently, but also playfully – in the mood I
believe to be most appropriate mood for contemplation of spiritual matters.
I claim no authority for this scheme. It came as revelation, indeed, but only
in the sense that all ideas and thoughts and feelings are experienced as
found or sent or given. Certainly I will not tell you that you are damned if
you do not believe in these Gods. I will say that if you don’t like mine, you
will have to find a God or Gods of your own – as, probably, you already
have. (People who call themselves atheists or agnostics usually worship
Progress, Knowledge, Art, Money, Sex, Power, Motherhood, The Flag,
Apple Pie6 or whatever else.) It is difficult to live with no Gods at all; and
we might all agree that those who have none are the truly damned. Most
people get found and kept by some God or other, but we should not forget
that people regularly forsake their Gods for ones more suited to their
changing needs. It happens too, that our Gods find us unworthy, get
disgusted, and forsake us. Arrangements with divinity are apt to come
unstuck as society and living arrangements change.
So I ask you to imagine the world as a field on which five great Gods –
principles, powers, agendas, or whatever you like to call them – compete
for influence. I make no claim that these Gods are anything but ideas, and
will try to show how they relate to more traditional religious ideas. I do
suggest that they are powerful ideas – well worth meditating upon, praying
to, and worshiping. Quite possibly, you already worship one or more of
them without knowing it.

Iam
The first God I wish to honor here is Reality or Being itself. I’ll call him
Iam (pronounced “yam”), with conscious reference to Yahveh, the God of
Abraham, whose name in Hebrew means I Am. Characteristics of this God
center on his massive facticity – his durability, weight and hardness. This
“Rock of Ages” has other aspects too, but pure Being, or Suchness is the
key to his identity. These traits, however, are not wholly consistent with
Yahveh’s other traditional attributes – e.g. love, creativity, justice, mercy –
which often move him to DO things. Pure Being does nothing. It simply IS.
With respect to whatever game is in progress, Iam is the current state of
play. In chess, he is the position on the board. In poker, he is the cards as
dealt and the state of betting. Applied to some building project, he would be
the requirements and the resources at your disposal. In every case, we
6 A rosy-cheeked Goddess of respectability, American-style.
experience Iam as constraint and possibility, never as force or value
judgment. Keeping cool with Iam (one test of authentic divinity is that it is
dangerous to get on its bad side) means staying in touch with reality –
remaining aware and responsive to what is going on. Knowing Iam, we
keep our desires and projects in perspective. We don’t let ourselves get
“carried away.”
Islam emphasizes submission to this divine actuality. Judaism and
Christianity, in different ways, sanction a degree of opposition toward the
brute reality of things. By contrast, Chinese Taoists sought to live in
harmony with the secret Way (Tao), emphasizing not the static, massive
Being of Iam, but his fluid, spontaneous Becoming. As zi ran, the “self-so”
– “that which happens by itself” – the idea of change, or at least a certain
kind of change (organic, cyclical, harmonious), was subsumed by the
Taoists under the idea of changeless permanence. The Judaic and Platonist
idea of Pure Being has much in common with the Taoist idea of
Spontaneous Becoming (which also doesn’t DO anything, but simply IS, in
a condition of unceasing change that leaves everything always the same).
There is some contrast between these ideas of Iam and Tao, but also a
profound connection.
For nothing can be wholly static. What appears changeless and
permanent is actually a dynamic process hovering so close to a point of
apparent stability that all perturbations can be neglected. 7 This attractor
point will drift over time – not because anything obvious is pushing it, but
because the system as a whole undergoes global, organic change which
appears to happen by itself, with no obvious cause to drive it. What drives
change, we now know, is the intrinsic logic of self-organizing systems.
Where Plato spoke of unchanging form beneath all visible change, and
Oriental sages spoke of Tao, the “gateless gate” and of wu-wei, the self-so,
we today would speak of ecological balance and (only very gradual) co-
evolution. We can see all these ideas as facets of Iam, the actuality or
suchness of things, whose power consists in the fact that reality is always
over-determined, and therefore resistant to change. Thus, when we ask why
things are as they are, we usually find a dozen explanations; and when, with
great effort, we do at last succeed in changing something, we often find the

7 In modern theory such a point of approximate stability is called an attractor,

which (it can be proven) are of four kinds. The most interesting of these is the
so-called strange attractor, round which the system cycles endlessly in orbits
that are never exactly alike.
system creeping back toward just the state before we intervened.
Harsh as we often find Iam, he is a divinity worth worshiping because
this world – just as it is, and whether we like it or not – is the world we have
to live in; and the core of our religious problem is to find the heart to do so.
It is a matter of courage, basically; and as William James remarked, when
you get right down to it, there are only two kinds: “the courage to die, and
the courage to get out of bed in the morning.” When we get out of bed, Iam
is what we encounter, what we have to deal with, and the stance and style
we take toward him defines us as the persons we are. In the last reckoning,
our praise or cursing of actuality is at the core of our daily life.
Yet another attribute of Iam is his inclusiveness. All the ancient nature
Gods are parts of him – his sons and daughters, so to speak: Apollo,
Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and the factual aspects of a thousand lesser
deities.
Finally, Iam is the point of departure for all hypotheticals and value
judgments. We run our affairs and all our actions on the tension between
What Is and What Ought To Be. A strong tension between these, based on a
clear sense of each, is what keeps us going. When the tension is lost at
either pole, motivation collapses, and there is no reason to get out of bed.
For this reason, desire (or Libby as I’ll call her) is the second divine
principle I’d recognize.

Libby
Desire in all its phases of imagining, wanting, reaching for, taking and
assimilating – but also of being wanted, reached for, taken – is also a
divinity worth worshiping. The Greeks knew the active side of Desire as
Eros, and personified its object as Aphrodite, the Love Goddess. On the
theory that desire usually needs to be provoked and encouraged somehow,
we need not make this distinction but are free to do so.
Freud used the term libido for Eros, wishing to emphasize (as the Greeks
also understood) that these energies are not necessarily sexual. Rather
sexual desire is only one manifestation of the erotic impulse to draw near,
possess and merge: to engulf or be engulfed by the object of interest.
The word desire misleads for another reason also. The principle at point
includes negative feelings as well as positive ones: fear, disgust and hate, as
well as attraction and longing. Even in her sexual aspect, desire is not just
sweetheart or wife. She is also the witch and the dominatrix: the lady with
the lash, and the stiletto heels. She is also Fate and Death – the end of all
human desire – imagined as the crone who washes your corpse, and winds
you in your shroud.
The principle I have in mind includes all these aspects and polarities –
male and female, arousing and being aroused, youthful and ancient, cruel
and kind. There is an aspect of Libby for every pleasure or good a human
being could want, and for every ill to be feared and shunned. Wanting a
modern name, I will speak of Libby for all these attributes packaged
together; but will give a female persona and pronoun to the complex,
resulting idea, as everyone always has. Perhaps it is unfair to actual, flesh-
and-blood women, that we so much tend to see them not as themselves but
as avatars of this Goddess. On the other hand, since the same tendency
pervades every mythology I can think of, any apology due must come from
Iam – who never apologizes for anything.
Libby pervades the biosphere, and the social world as well, since all that
lives desires to thrive and grow and reproduce its kind, and reaches out for
what it needs to do so. Thus, human society can be seen as a vast game, in
which people compete by conventional means to satisfy conventionally
formulated desires. We might even see Libby in the attraction and repulsion
of fundamental particles. We might see the physical universe as a quantum
field of energy, roiling with lust for itself. The point is, Libby seeks (is the
principle of) change and increase, as Iam is the principle of stability and
continuation. In political terms, Libby is the revisionist power desiring
reform and progress; Iam is the status quo power who insists that things
should remain as they are. In aikido language, Libby is uke, the warrior who
generates the energy of the situation by his attack. Iam is nage, the warrior
who receives and deals with the energy that Libby provides. Libby makes
the world go round, but Iam keeps it moving in circles, around the same
axis. The cooperation of Iam and Libby comprises Tao, mentioned earlier as
the principle of harmonious change.
About Libby and every other divinity, the question worth discussing is:
What sort of worship does she require? A divinity is such, after all, because
we feel a need to propitiate it, and do it honor. We feel that Libby is a
divinity, because we experience Desire as a power beyond conscious
volition that can get us into serious trouble. How should we proceed?
The key, I think, is to recognize that Libby is a collective name for all
the purposes and goals in a given situation – not just your own, but those of
your counter-players as well. As regards our own purposes, we experience
Libby as hope, pride and the pleasure of impending fulfillment – or as
frustration. As regards the purposes of others, we experience her as
sympathetic and congenial, or as contradictory and inimical. Getting square
with Libby means having the courage of your desires and being clear about
your own intentions, but keeping out of the way of the hostile intentions of
others. It means negotiating intelligently with adversaries, so that common
interests are not sacrificed to the issues in dispute.
Because Libby and Iam are frequently at odds, it is sometimes difficult
to keep on good terms with both of them together. The only way is to adjust
your desires to the available means – which Libby may or may not allow.
Buddhists, teaching that desire is the cause of suffering, have tended to
reject Libby, demonizing her in much the way that Christians demonize
Joker, a third divine principle that we’ll come to in a moment. Or do they
advise that if we embrace desire, we must accept the concomitant suffering?
Or (again) do they advise us to stay detached about joy and suffering alike,
taking both in stride, and taking responsibility for both, as inevitable
products of our desires? Do we really want to get off the merry-go-round of
Life and Death?

Joker
A third divinity, corresponding to certain aspects of the Norse God Loki or
the Greek Hermes, I will name Joker or Trickster, as he is called in the
8
myths of certain Indian tribes. To the Hebrews, his name is Sātān , the
9
Adversary. Christians fear and loath him as “the Devil .” (These characters
should not be confused. It’s hard to see how the Christian Devil could be on
friendly, bantering terms with God, like Sātān in the Book of Job.)
In general, monotheists can see no good in this character. Any good he
works is always despite himself. Frustration of his will to evil is the essence
of his punishment. This is a clever bit of theology, but also grossly unfair
and more than a little childish. Emotional grown-ups know that the
distinction between Good and Evil is rarely absolute, and that obedience,
even to God, is not the only virtue. To most non-monotheist peoples, Joker
has been a figure of inventiveness, spontaneity, humor, chance and
mischief, more than of real evil.
A modern mind will see Joker as personifying the principle of random
variation on which natural selection operates. In this Darwinian role, though
he does harm more often than good, his interventions are vital. By their

8 With two broad “ah” sounds, and the accent on the second syllable.
9 This name, cognate with the word “double,” has connotations of duality and
otherness.
very nature, self-organizing systems exist and sustain themselves “on the
edge of chaos,” and could not evolve without random disturbances that jolt
them out of equilibrium. There is evidence from biology that the mutation
rate of a species is a key parameter of evolutionary “fitness” – itself
adjusted by evolution towards some optimum level, relative to the rate of
change in its environment.
But chance disturbance is the crudest part of Joker’s work. This God
shows his real stature when personal desires at cross purposes produce a
result that no one looked for. A famous example would be the suicide of the
lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where the family feud helped
along by the friar’s plan lead to a tragic outcome. Another example is the
situation known as Prisoner’s Dilemma10, where two crooks are induced to
rat on each other through a perverse rationality. In a similar way, democratic
political systems voting Yes or No on a series of related issues can reach an
outcome inferior to one that a majority would have preferred. An arms race,
or the notorious “tragedy of the commons” would be examples in the area
of public policy. In each of these cases, Joker’s intervention is by no means
random, but more like what Hegel called “the cunning of reason.” This is
why hell, proverbially, is paved with good intentions: Two individuals,
corporate entities or nations making autonomous, rational choices in all
good faith can reach disastrous outcomes. Just read the newspaper.
Even a single individual can play into Joker’s hand by being rational
instead of reasonable. Language has peculiar properties. If a little of
something is good then more must be better. If something is good, then it
must be good not just for me but also for you, and for all of us together. Or,
in the other direction: If something can be abused, then it is evil and should
be banned. Once banned, then anyone who uses it – even appropriately and
in moderation – is a criminal and should be punished. The joke is on those –
and there are many – who cannot see that a remedy may easily do more
harm than the ill it promises to cure.
In all these ways, Joker plays hob with our best intentions. Yet he is not
actually malevolent, but merely careless and indifferent to human welfare.
This God not only drives the process of evolution and all creative novelty,
but is himself the animating spark of all emergent properties and systems.
Joker is the principle of self-reference at the heart of recursive algorithm
and paradox – as when I write a program with loops of code that call
themselves, or when I tell you (as I now do) that every sentence in this

10 Discussed in any book on Game Theory.

essay is a deliberate lie. Including the last sentence, of course. Joker
personifies the so-called holon principle of emergent properties that makes
the difference between a working system and a pile of raw materials or
components. Wherever a whole is more than the sum of its parts, we can see
Joker’s creative, mischievous play. Knowing only the chemicals that
comprise it, who could imagine a living organism?
Monotheists blatantly and persistently refuse to give the Devil his due:
Attributing all Joker’s mischief to Satan and his creativity to God is not
only unjust but anthropocentric, as we have no warrant to assume a God
who puts human welfare before all other considerations. This is implausible
on the face of it. Also, it turns out that the same concepts of chance, crossed
purposes, self-reference and emergence can explain both why the world is
so complex and beautiful, and why affairs go wrong so often. Even
Christians have had to recognize that God sometimes uses the Devil to do
his work. Why assume that the latter is displeased by his own finest effects,
to the point of experiencing them as a punishment? Why assume he has
been rebellious or disobedient at all, not part of the scheme of things from
the beginning?
Even from a narrowly human perspective, demonizing this God as we
have done – cursing him, and consigning him to his own realm of
pernicious power and punishment – is a mistake. Joker is an outlaw by
definition, but treating him so only increases his power. The harder we try
to prevent his interventions, the more vulnerable we become. When we
build an unsinkable ship, Joker finds some way to sink it. When we devise a
fool-proof plan, Joker will see that it screws up. “Anything that can go
wrong will.” Anything that can’t possibly go wrong is still more certain to
do so. The wise Greeks knew this, and built their temples with deliberate
imperfections, to ensure that they would stand. The only hope is to stay
loose, keep it simple, design for the likelihood of failure, develop a sense of
humor, and be ready to start all over when efforts come to naught. “The best
laid plans. . . aft gang aglie,” as Robert Burns said. “Life is what happens
while we are planning something else.”
Our conclusion then is that the world we know is Joker’s trick – played
on the eternal flirtation of Iam’s massive suchness (the Immovable Body)
with Libby’s Irresistible Force? The emergence of matter from nothingness,
of mind from dumb matter, of true consciousness from primitive mind, and
of society from the actions of self-interested and willful individuals are
Joker’s pranks – that we are only now beginning to understand. With this
thought we come to the fourth divinity of our pantheon: Ken, Goddess of
Mind, who is Joker’s favorite daughter.

Ken
Until very recently, mind and matter could only be conceived as separate
substances – entirely different types of entity – mysteriously inter-
connected for the duration of a life. Today (by analogy with the
programmed capabilities of an electronic computer, the properties of
chemical compounds, and many other emergent phenomena), it seems more
plausible that mind is not a separate substance, but actually a subtle
property of matter arranged and relating to itself in remarkable ways. If so,
the creative role of Joker is beyond doubt. That a lump of clay might
somehow configure itself into a sentient creature, remain so for a time, and
then revert to lifeless clay is surely the most sublime of practical jokes.
But once emerged, and while she endures, Ken is clearly a Goddess in
her own right, with her divinity explicit in the Hindu and Buddhist
religions, and suggested ambiguously in the Western monotheist religions
as well. Each mind, reflecting the world from its unique vantage point, is
felt to be not just a means, but an end in itself. Each has its autonomy, its
dignity, its right to acknowledgment and consideration. Insofar as ethical
judgment rests on more than long-term self-interest, our spontaneous
recognition of the spark of divinity in every mind is surely one of its
foundations. Insofar as our tendency to place ourselves at the summit of
evolution is more than self-congratulation, that recognition is its root.
Ken has a varied progeny of lesser Gods and Goddesses, muses, patron
saints and the like, corresponding to different moods and attitudes, and to
the various arts and crafts. These are all works of mind, obviously, and each
has a spirit of its own. But there is an ancient puzzle about Ken that goes far
to explain why she must be treated as a divinity. In one sense she is highly
individual, inhering in each of us, and giving each of us a uniquely
individual mind. In another sense, she is entirely collective: As Hindus and
Buddhists teach, there is only a single Mind, the so-called Atman, of which
11
all personal minds are fragments. You can feel this in a crowd sometimes,

11 I would not follow Hindu teaching that the personal mind is simply an error or
an illusion. What I believe rather is that the personal and collective aspects of
Ken are alternative interpretations – neither mistaken, but neither completely
correct either. As usual with interpretations, the truth is to be found in the
structure of argument between them. Otherwise, what we have are just different
modes of understanding, each with its own story to tell highlighting certain
when something exciting or terrifying is happening. You can feel it in an
organization under stress, when its conventional wisdom is adjusting to the
altered circumstances. You can get a sense of it by introspection, if you ask
yourself how much of what you know and believe derives from first-hand
experience. You get a sense of it reading history, noticing how the zeitgeist
of a certain epoch differed from our own. Above all, perhaps, you get a
sense of the collectivity of mind when you become aware of the dependence
of your thought and feeling on the language that you speak. Language is
obviously a group artifact, exerting a similar influence on all who speak and
write it – cutting and stretching thought according to the concepts it makes
available. Correspondingly, mind itself can seem to be a group
phenomenon, insofar as thoughts are only articulately thinkable within a
structure of symbols that one’s group has made available.
On the personal level, Ken has two voices, so to speak: There is a
passive voice that feels, endures, remembers and bears witness. And there is
an active voice that imposes interpretations, makes all sorts of plans, and
tries to carry them out. These are intimately connected, and in constant
dialogue, but they are logically distinct. In fact, both are necessary to
conscious experience: Raw sensation must be evaluated and interpreted
before it can be experienced. At the same time interpretation cannot have an
entirely free hand. To further creaturely survival, it must stop short of
complete fantasy. Interpretation must submit to constraints from the
material it processes.
In recent thought, too much emphasis has been placed on the active
phase of mental life – as if a mind could make just whatever it pleased of
the body’s appetites and pains; and I have argued elsewhere that
understanding is a better word than interpretation for our construction of
cognitive reality. Even so, there is no doubt that Ken’s relationship to Iam is
not passive and submissive. Actually we can imagine her as a mediator
between Libby and Iam – keeping the tension between desire and reality,
between “ought” and “is,” and helping us turn the former into the latter.
Ken also has a peculiar relationship with Boss, God of control,
management and government, the next (and last) deity discussed here. On
one hand, government is a rational process – an effort to impose some order
on the possibilities for competition and conflict in a society, and to provide
whatever infrastructure will make the social games more playable and more

aspects of the matter while glossing the others. Please see my book, Sharing
Realities, in which this concept of “polyphonic” truth is developed.
rewarding to their players. On the other, it rests on a foundation of violence,
the negation of mind and reason. We have no notion how to resolve this
paradox, which today seems deadlier than ever.

Boss
The God I am calling Boss corresponds roughly to the Greek God Zeus, to
the Norse Wotan, to a central aspect of the Hebrew Yahveh and of God the
Father in the Catholic Trinity. Monotheism, in fact, can be seen as Boss’s
bid for cosmic dominion and total power. An important special case of Boss
is government – bossing at the public level.
Boss mediates between Iam and Libby; and between conflicting demands
from Libby herself. He tries to stay on good terms with these deities, to the
extent that they will let him, although they test his skill at handling
dilemmas. He understands well that to control others he must first control
himself; and so He tries to be an even-tempered God. However, Boss does
not easily tolerate opposition, and gets nasty when His power is threatened.
He is irreconcilably at odds with Joker who mocks him endlessly, and on
ambivalent terms with Ken who is often an ally but sometimes a dangerous
nuisance. To keep Boss happy, you have to do what you are told, send only
welcome news and advice, and refrain from making trouble. Ken also likes
order and control up to a point, but not always at the expense of her other
values.
Boss has different faces for different occasions, but must always work at
being Boss. That is the chief difference between him and Iam, who always
is Iam, without effort on his part. Iam is the suchness of things, the self-so
in Taoist language. By contrast, Boss has to collect, cultivate and husband
his power, and he sometimes over-does it. Monotheism glosses this
distinction. The distinction between Iam and Boss is not available in its
language, with the result that established power is made to appear inevitable
and eternal when it is really nothing of the sort.
Putting Boss at the top of the cosmic pyramid (as he is at the top of
earthly ones) precisely inverts the natural order of things. As a son of Ken,
himself an offspring of Libby and Joker, Boss is the most junior of the five
gods – his power the weakest, and the most fragile – which may explain
why he is so touchy and insecure. It’s not just that others covet his power,
though their absence of real loyalty doesn’t help. More deeply, real-life
bosses are divided within themselves, although they dare not show it:
Management is, first and last, an act of rational will, but reason and will
seldom point in a single clear direction. What Boss personally wants, what
he publicly and officially wants, and what he thinks he should want may or
may not be all the same thing.
As well, Mind itself is of two minds on management’s need for control
and rational order. When Ken is ambivalent, when Libby and Joker take a
hand, or when Boss’ goals contravene Iam’s massive fact, the best laid plan
is unlikely to prevail.

4 Polytheism Reconsidered
The ludic, polytheistic system outlined here represents one approach, albeit
perhaps an idiosyncratic one, to what may be considered perennial theology.
It has points of contact with the great monotheist religions, but sharply
differs from them in seeing conflicting principles or volitions, not one
coherent will, behind the world that we inhabit. Its central point is that this
world and humankind itself are works-in-progress, stumbling along in self-
creation. We are not finished and perfect; not degenerating from a former
state of perfection; not working out some pre-existing divine plan. These
Gods themselves are not perfect beings, neither omniscient nor omnipotent;
and cannot know how events will unfold, any more than we do. As
demiurges and creators, they are creatures of human imagination and of
each other. Each holds a necessary place amongst the others in a scheme
that could not work, that would scarcely be intelligible, if any one of them
were missing.
Asked about my serious religious persuasion, these days I would
describe myself as a Darwinian gnostic. The solid evidence we have
suggests that the universe is self-organizing “from the bottom up,” rather
than designed and called into being “top down” by a coherent intelligence.
Yet naturalistic secularism, the correct starting point for scientific
investigation, feels incomplete as a personal philosophy. I think Allport is
right that life needs to be lived in some sort of imaginative, humanly
meaningful context, and believe too that a consciously chosen context is
preferable to one merely inherited or stumbled into. Accordingly, I think
religion has its place in a fully human life; that serious thought about
religious matters is necessary and proper; and that there is nothing
intrinsically superstitious about a religious world-view, although most
brands in the religious marketplace strike me as appallingly superstitious.
Finally, I think that any personal religion that ignores scientific findings
about the world or refuses sympathetic understanding to the diversity of
human religious experience is intellectually challenged (to say it as politely
as possible), and that a necessarily pluralistic age like ours might do well to
reconsider polytheism as a serious option.
Withal, if the ludic religion outlined in these pages makes fewer promises
than the religions of divine fiat that we’ve been used to, it is also far less
rigid in its demands. It does not ask you to believe that nothing of
importance has been learned in the last few thousand years, or that human
societies and human existence have not changed in important ways, or that
some idea of good behaviour prescribed to meet conditions back then is still
binding now. It does not pretend to answer all key human questions for
everyone and forever.